


6645 Charlotte Street

by audreycritter



Category: Batman - All Media Types, Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Alfred Pennyworth & Jason Todd - Mentioned, Barbara Gordon & Jason Todd - Mentioned, Flashbacks, Gen, Grief, Home Ownership, Hurt/Comfort, PTSD, Pneumonia, Rebuilding, Sickfic, mint - Freeform, rebirth canon-ish, repairing floors and relationships, tw: past canonical parental loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-23
Updated: 2018-04-23
Packaged: 2019-04-26 21:57:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,977
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14411382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Jason is a danger to himself and others when pneumonia leads to flashbacks. Since they’ve been on better terms recently, he agrees to let Bruce keep an eye on him.Except, he just wants to go home.And he doesn’t mean the Manor anymore.





	6645 Charlotte Street

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cerusee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cerusee/gifts).



> thanks to cerusee for workshopping :) sorry this is so long overdue.

The hissing of the bus brakes startled Jason Todd out of his fevered daze and he glanced around frantically, with the horrid sensation that he’d actually fallen asleep and missed his stop. The corner store outside the window was reassuringly familiar and he staggered to his feet, got his balance, and shoved toward the door with his hands jammed in his jacket pockets.

It was pushing eighty degrees outside but the idea of taking his coat off sent a shudder through him. He stumbled off the bus and down the block.

An afternoon walk to shake off his malaise had quickly turned disastrous. Rather than improving with fresh air (or as fresh as one could get in inner Gotham), his fever had climbed and his limbs had gotten shaky. He felt like a man with toothpicks for legs, rattling around precariously. The plan to stay in one of the nearest safehouses while working on a case quickly turned into a desire to just go home and he’d changed tack to head that way. If he was going to be sick, he didn’t want to ride it out in one of the closet-sized emergency hideaways or the drafty cavernous ones in the old subway system. He’d prefer to burrow under covers at home, where he felt safe, and comfortable.

Then deep, racking coughs had drawn a sour taste into his mouth, followed by a soft wheeze, and he’d detoured to the nearest bus headed toward Leslie Thompkin’s clinic. 

Now, he shuffled inside, pushing the heavy door aside with the uneasy feeling that it was heavier than usual. The waiting room was full, which didn’t surprise him. He signed in at the desk and ended up with a clipboard to fill out. He sat down in one of the few empty chairs, coughing into his elbow, and shivered. Jason let his head drop against the wall with a _thunk_ and closed his eyes against the surging headache.

To distract himself, he glanced listlessly over the form that he wasn’t filling out.

Dr. Thompkins didn’t need him to, and he didn’t know how he’d answer half of it anyway.

He’d been sitting, alternating wary dozing and coughing, for what felt like hours but was only thirty minutes by the wall clock, when Dr. Thompkins herself poked her head into the waiting room rather than the nurse who’d collected the last five patients.

“Jason?”

He caught her eyes and gave a small wave when her gaze was hunting around. He dragged himself upright, tucked the blank forms on the clipboard under his arm, and followed her. He wanted bed, his bed, at his house, and not to be on his feet in a clinic in one of the more dangerous parts of Gotham. 

“You don’t usually come in the front,” Dr. Thompkins chided, taking him by the elbow as soon as the door closed behind him. She steered him to a room and he shrugged.

“Normal sick,” he muttered, surprised at how scratchy his voice sounded. The coughing had been doing some damage. It was also becoming hard to inhale deeply and he did his best not to think about that.

Dr. Thompkins had skipped the routine nurse intake and didn’t seem very concerned with replicating all the usual tests, though she did quickly take his temperature and blood pressure while asking him questions about how long he’d been sick (not long) and what was bothering him the most (breathing, as of the past ten minutes) and if he’d been exposed to anything (she meant toxins, and no, he hadn’t). 

“I want to get an x-ray of that,” she said, with a dubious frown, after listening to his lungs with the stethoscope. He coughed again. “You sure it’s just been today?”

“Just today,” Jason nodded. “I know better than to try to lie to you, doc.”

“Hmm,” she said. “I’ll bet you do. Alright. Come on, then. Then I’ll get you set up with a breathing treatment, see if we can’t clear it up a bit before you go.”

Jason swayed when he stood to follow her. Her unmasked concern, professional and personal alike, was evident on her face. He kept his balance and grunted something along the lines of being ready, rather than admit that he hadn’t exactly…slept…in two days. It wasn’t technically lying if it was just omission. 

The jacket had to come off for the x-ray and the sensation of the heavy lead apron was too much like being buried. He had to force himself to count breaths and think about putting armor on instead. It distracted him from feeling cold, so that didn’t hit until he was back in an exam room with a breathing mask on his face. Medicated fog swirled around his mouth and nose and he felt like he was sitting in a refrigerator. 

Dr. Thompkins left him after a reassuring pat on the arm and Jason conjugated Latin verbs in his head to calm himself, to not lose any more oxygen to a needless and irrational panic attack that was swelling in the pit of his stomach and creeping up into his heart. He closed his eyes and focused, willing the medicine to work fast.

He was falling asleep when it occurred to him that he hadn’t even dragged his feet about the steroids in the nebulizer. That’s how he knew it was bad, but he was too tired to care.

* * *

When Jason heard Dr. Thompkins calling his name, as if from far away, he had no idea where he was but he knew deep in his bones it was a place he didn’t want to be— a place of drowning in dirt, in magic, in smoke. 

Loud wheezing gasps filled his ears as the world settled into place around him again. He was standing in the middle of a tiny room at the clinic and it was a disaster. It looked like a tornado had torn through the room, but it was just Dr. Thompkins in the doorway and Jason himself standing with hunched shoulders, panting like a caged animal.

Her eyes took on a determined glint when she saw the cognizance in his face, and hurried forward to grab his arm right before he toppled over from shock.

“I…”

“Had a flashback of some kind,” Dr. Thompkins said sternly, taking his arm and shoving him gently back down into a chair. “Sit down. I was just coming to tell you the x-rays showed pneumonia when I heard the racket and it’s a good thing I got here before any of the volunteers did.”

“Shit,” Jason exhaled, sinking his head into his hands. “I’m so sorry, I…I’ll clean it up.”

“Did you hear me? I just said you have pneumonia, Jason Peter Todd,” Dr. Thompkins said. Jason flinched— he didn’t get the full name treatment from very many people anymore. Rarely ever. “You’re not cleaning this up. You’re going to go home and rest and call me if it gets worse, so I can admit you to Gotham Memorial. Now, who am I calling?”

The temptation to run, as stupid as it was, was waylaid by Dr. Thompkins’ hand on his back, rubbing calm circles between his shoulder blades. The discarded nebulizer mask was on the floor, in the middle of a coil of tubing ripped out of the machine and a scattered container of tongue depressors. The dense pressure in his chest was strong evidence that he still needed meds, along with the breathless, choking cough that delayed his answer.

“I’d let you stay here,” Dr. Thompkins said sympathetically, “but I need the bed space and if _this_ happens again…”

“I might hurt someone,” Jason said hoarsely, running trembling fingers through his hair. “I know.”

“You wouldn’t mean to,” Dr. Thompkins said, lifting his chin and giving him a small, reassuring smile. It didn’t keep the resolution out of her voice. “But yes, that’s a possibility I can’t risk with my volunteer staff. I’ll call someone to come get you, just tell me who.”

More and more, Jason just wanted to crawl into bed and shut out the world. He tried to sigh and ended up coughing instead; it took too long to catch his breath after.

“Bruce,” he gasped, on instinct. “Call Bruce.”

Fortunately, she didn’t pressure him for his certainty or a reason and took his answer at face value. Jason supposed they’d been doing well enough the past two years that even if they weren’t exactly close, anymore, they also weren’t completely at odds. He’d been to the manor enough times that it wasn’t a huge deal, now, to stop by. 

Dr. Thompkins gave him strict orders to leave the mess, claiming other patients had done worse in the past, and left the room.

Jason ignored her and piled half of it on the counter before his legs refused to hold him up, and he sat down on the pull-out step stool of the exam table, shivering.

That’s where he still was, fighting to stay awake, when the door opened again and Bruce was there. He was in a suit. Dr. Thompkins must have caught him at work, which explained why it hadn’t taken very long for him to show up.

He was crouching in front of him a second later, while Jason hugged himself to try to stay warm. He had no idea where his jacket had gone.

“Sorry,” he said, through chattering teeth. 

“Don’t be,” Bruce said. “Let’s get you home.”

Jason’s legs were recovered enough that he managed to walk under his own power out to the car. At some point, Bruce had picked up a brown paper sack of meds and papers. Jason hadn’t seen the exact moment, but the bag had his first name in marker across one side.

He closed his eyes and he was drowning, sinking, not breathing. He snapped them back open, hunting hungrily for a lifeline. Bruce climbed into the driver’s seat and that was the first moment he reached out and actually put a hand on him, on the back of his neck like Jason was a puppy being carried by scruff.

“Breathe as deep as you can,” Bruce said, calm and sure. “Slow. You’re getting enough oxygen.”

Jason nodded and closed his eyes again and it didn’t feel so much like drowning this time. He didn’t have the energy or inclination to put up any kind of fight, so he was relieved deep in his bones to know it could feel like he didn’t need to anymore, with Bruce. For the first time since he’d told Dr. Thompkins his preference, he stopped wondering if he should regret it. He’d known Bruce, of all people, would be able to keep him from accidentally hurting someone or being hurt himself, but now his lingering unease about how he’d feel while conscious faded.

The car wove through midday traffic, nearing the Sprang Bridge. They were a few blocks from it when Bruce spoke. 

“Did you want to go to an apartment, or…?” 

He left it hanging, which was unusual enough for Bruce. Even sick, Jason could tell he was unsettled, perhaps not sure if asking for an address was crossing their unspoken _don’t ask for too much_ boundary that had made things work for a while. And if he was asking like that, either he was hiding that he’d found Jason’s places anyway or he genuinely didn’t know. 

Jason didn’t want to go to one of his safehouses. He didn’t want to go to the little-used apartment he maintained under his most common alias, a place he stopped by once a month or so to keep up pretenses and restock weapons from deep storage. He wanted to go home.

He shook his head.

“Manor?” Bruce asked, to confirm. 

Jason nodded. It was familiar, at least. He could accept that, for a day or two. 

They were just over the Sprang when a lump rose in his throat at the sudden memory of being in bed at the Manor with the flu, waking when Bruce came in after a patrol to check on him, bearing medicine and a cool cloth and ended up just not leaving, but spending the night in a chair. Of watching cartoons for hours on the TV, mindless and numb, while trying not to barf. He had a sudden clear and precise vision of Damian walking through the room, saying something snide about the show on the screen; of Tim retreating with his mug in hand.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like them— he’d come around to _liking_ them at least, more than tolerating them even— but the contrast between _then_ and _now_ squeezed his chest in a way a lot like not breathing. 

“Stop,” he rasped, “stop.”

Bruce cut across two lanes to get to the emergency pulloff, and if he’d been any less skilled as a driver they might not have made it. It made Jason instantly feel a pang of remorse for making it sound so urgent, but at the same time he was overwhelmed with the tight grip of dread.

“I can’t,” he said, leaning forward with his arms curled around his stomach. “I can’t. I want to go home.”

It hung there in the air, the clearest he’d ever said _the Manor isn’t my home anymore_ , even though they’d both known it was true for years. Or maybe Jason had known it, come to accept it, sometime around when the guest bedroom he used became more or less his new permanent one when he did stay there. 

“Where is home?” Bruce asked, so flat and precise that even with pneumonia, with a fever and a headache, Jason could tell it was guarded and intentional.

“Sixty-six forty-five Charlotte street,” Jason said, his forehead pressed against his knees. The surge of panic he’d expected never came and he clung to that. 

Bruce didn’t ask for directions, didn’t plug it into a GPS device; his head held a map of Gotham as accurate as any computer, enough to rival an old taxi-driver’s intimate knowledge of every street and avenue and alley. The car pulled out into traffic again and Jason sat up just as Bruce caught a turn that would loop them around and spit them back out onto the bridge. 

The address was in a neighborhood in the southern tip of the city, completely opposite where they were now. In traffic, it was going to take at least an hour. Jason wondered if Bruce would try to fill the silence with words, if Jason didn’t do it for him. 

Ten minutes said no. Jason glanced at Bruce’s face, too tired for anything but willing to draw on some buried reserve if he needed to extract himself from this situation before it turned into a disaster. But Bruce didn’t look angry, not even in that blank way he had when he was biding his time with it.

That was, Jason supposed, safe enough. 

He meant to stay awake the rest of the drive. 

His body betrayed him and he slept.

* * *

The sound of a car door closing woke him with a jolt. Jason whipped his neck around, looking one direction and then another, before he grasped where he was and who he was with. Comprehension settled in with orientation, and he glanced out the passenger window up at the little red house.

6645 Charlotte Street sat twenty feet back from the worn sidewalk, on a little bump of a hill. A swinging white gate guarded the short run of front steps, and the Craftsman dormer was shaded by a mature oak tree that had given Jason’s gutters a run for his money his first autumn there. He’d been out on the roof scooping leaves out in the freezing rain, trying to keep the gutters draining properly. 

“This it?” Bruce asked, opening the passenger side door while he looked up at the house. Jason could hear the mix of curiosity and skepticism in his voice. “Jim Gordon lives three blocks that way.”

“I know,” Jason said, with a cough. His head was swimming and that was the only reason…well, mostly the reason…he didn’t shrug Bruce’s help away when a hand caught under his elbow to balance him as he stood. He fumbled in his pocket for keys before they trekked up the stairs. “Make sure the gate latches,” he muttered over his shoulder when Bruce stopped to close it.

The porch was cooler than the surrounding air by several degrees, enough to make Jason’s fevered body involuntarily shiver. He let Bruce take the key ring and open the door. 

Bruce pushed the door open and Jason stepped in ahead of him, into the dim interior that smelled familiar and lulling even with his congested nose. It was the clean scent of orange wood soap that the banister and bookshelves had been scrubbed down with, the dry paper of old books, the faint whiff of mint from the kitchen and the musk of old leather from a salvaged arm chair.

Jason had just enough energy to spare Bruce’s reaction a hesitant glance, taking in the poorly masked surprise as he blinked and let his eyes adjust to the lower light. Then, he suddenly didn’t have the energy to handle anything, not even standing, really, and he trudged up the stairs. His boots sank into the plush carpet runner, violating his usual no shoes inside rule, as he leaned on the railing.

The bedroom welcomed him with its pale pink curtains and muted teal quilt. He bent at the doorway to untie his boots and nearly passed out. The blankets, he decided, he could wash. He tumbled across the bed face first with his jacket and boots still on, then flopped over when the press of the mattress hurt his chest.

Quiet steps sounded on the stairs. Bruce could be silent, so he must have wanted Jason to know he was following. A moment later, he was in the room near the end of the bed. Wordlessly, he finished untying Jason’s boots and tugged them off. 

The scrape of furniture legs got Jason to open his eyes— Bruce was next to him now, moving the heavy wooden bedside table with the white marble top. He had a nebulizer tucked under his arm, the cord in one hand, hunting for an outlet. He plugged it in and moved the few books off the table to make room for the machine. 

“You can put ‘em…on the…on the…” Jason waved aimlessly with one hand, the fog thick in his head like carded wool. 

Bruce set them on the dresser and paused to stare at the pictures in frames there. He couldn’t tell what was holding Bruce’s attention. One was a copy of a photo Alfred had found for him, of Bruce and Jason in Gotham Knights ball caps on one of the days they’d gone to a game together. The other picture was Catherine, a picture he’d made from a yearbook he’d tracked down from her senior year.

It wasn’t exactly like he remembered her, but it was close. It was when she had been healthy, and young, before the cancer and the drugs. Sometimes, now, his memories of her from when he was very small— the days when she still pretended to believe Willis would get them out of Park Row housing one day, that they’d make their way up in the world— blended with the picture he stared at every time he was here, at home. The face she’d had then merged with the high school picture, until he couldn’t quite remember what color her hair had been dyed then or if it had still brushed her shoulders or if she’d still worn tiny, glittering earrings.

Jason had drifted off again. He startled awake when Bruce pressed a hand to his shoulder and held out the nebulizer mask. 

“Jay. This, then sleep. I’ll stay.”

“Did Dr. Thompkins…” Jason trailed off when the hum of the machine filled the bedroom.

“She told me,” Bruce said. He sat on the edge of the bed and brushed Jason’s hair back with calloused fingers. Jason didn’t hate it as much as he was expecting. He didn’t hate it at all.

They sat there with the machine whirring and medicated mist filling the air around Jason’s mouth, interrupted by an occasional, futile cough. Bruce kept a hand on Jason’s forehead, though he was looking at the carpeted floor, and it held the flashbacks at bay. The hum turned to a hissing fizz when the medicine ran out.

“This is…your place?” Bruce asked, quietly, his voice weirdly choked as he tucked the tubing back into the box until it was needed again.

“Mhmm,” Jason answered. “Wanted a place. Got one.”

A place that wasn’t a crumbling apartment or uppercrust chrome, a place that wasn’t the Manor full of _could have beens_ or a safehouse full of _all you’ve got nows_. A place that was his and didn’t change by the week or the month, to return to when he’d pulled a muscle too hard or just wanted to sleep without being in his gear.

“It’s nice, Jay,” Bruce said, his voice flat. 

Jason was just awake enough to recognize it as the tone that hid emotion, not the lack of it. It had been easy in the beginning to get the two confused.

“Make yourself at home,” Jason mumbled into his pillow, as blankets were tucked around his shoulders and under his chin.

“I’ll be downstairs,” Bruce said, and even with the steroid trickling from his lungs out through every vein, Jason was too worn out to stay awake for even a second longer. 

* * *

Jason bought the house on purpose, of course. In all the things he’d managed to do or be involved in, accidental procurement of real estate wasn’t yet one of them. He just hadn’t been planning on it becoming a home— _his_ home— when he’d signed the paperwork.

He had signed it under a false name, with false identification, and a very real bank account. He’d paid for it in full, and the little lot in the neighborhood near Tricorner Yards was completely his. 

Originally, it had been for a stakeout of a long-haul case with a white collar criminal embezzling funds. The perp had lived across the street and two houses down, until GCPD had hauled him off to Blackgate. But somehow before that point, the take-out containers in Jason’s fridge had turned into him stocking the cabinets with actual groceries and living around the messed up plumbing became ripping out floor boards and drywall and hiring a plumber.

One trip after another to the packed hardware store at the edge of the police marina led to hiring a contractor to replace the floors and some old wiring. Watching the contractor’s crew work one day led to him thinking, _I could do that_. 

When he ended up canceling a workday while observing the embezzler on a day off, he just never rescheduled. He paid what he still owed and took over, trekking back to the hardware store to ask for advice when the internet failed him. 

It was good for his cover, he told himself while memorizing the names of the retired police detectives who mingled with the retired dock foremen at the hardware counter. They called him things like “sonny” and ribbed him about knowing drill bits but not wood types.

It was good for cover, in case neighbors dropped by and he didn’t want to seem suspicious, he told himself while putting clothes away in the dresser he’d refinished. It was good for cover, to stock the bookshelves he’d sanded and stained with his own books and new books.

Then, he was hanging new kitchen cabinets and grouting bathroom tiles the week he started to suspect he’d been lying to himself. He was leveling picture frames on the walls when he accepted that he had been: he wasn’t maintaining a temporary stakeout identity, he was making a place he intended to keep.

It was when he sprained his ankle and didn’t even question the impulse to leave his safehouse to go all the way to the sidewalk and tree-lined old neighborhood of brick and clapboard bungalows, to limp up the front steps and recover there, that it truly sunk in.

The house wasn’t merely part of a rotation of places to stay. It had become…home.

A home where photos of Alfred, Dick, Bruce, Babs, and even some of the younger ones shared the walls and shelf space with a few printed phone pictures of Art and Biz (though recently, they’d drifted toward other pursuits as Jason honed in on Gotham crime and weren’t around much, he still considered them friends). There was a sketch of Damian’s in the hallway, one given as a birthday gift left pinned on a safehouse door in an envelope. 

Hand-copied duplicates of some of Alfred’s recipes filled an index card box in the kitchen. Winter Red Hood gear was in locked crates in the basement he had waterproofed. Bookmarks were tucked into half a dozen books he was working on whenever he had the time.

His neighbors to the left were a working couple who delivered brownies his second week in the house, before he knew what it would become; once he decided he was staying even after the stakeout was successful, he returned the favor via a plate of cookies. 

His neighbor to the right was a retired cop and a widower, one who had bought his house when his wife and the Wayne parents were all still breathing. He’d been retired for longer than Jason had been alive by a solid decade. Jason told him he traveled frequently for work, asked him to keep an eye on the house when he was gone. They shared beers over the rickety fence that separated their postage stamp backyards, while Jason tried to tame his conquering mint and Lyle pruned his wife’s roses.

After the arrest, after he’d begun to think of it as home and not just another place, he meant to invite others over. He put it off for some reason he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Their intrusion into his safehouses— during emergencies or while searching for him or injured themselves— were irksome, but were both rare and easy to overlook because safehouses were _temporary_. It was no great loss to him to pack up and move on, to cross one spot off the list if he felt threatened. They were fairly bare of anything personal, anyway.

His apartment was like a space between these ideas, a place that was both his and easy to leave. It had personal mementos but was, overall, minimalist to match the layout. He’d never settled in, and he didn’t know if he felt out of place because of the surrounding high rise units or because sometime in the years with Bruce he’d come to regard something much more private as an ideal dwelling space. 

Whatever the reason, the apartment in denser Gotham was a place he slept with a sheathed knife under his pillow and in enough clothing to bail with only seconds’ warning. The home on Charlotte street had a loaded gun in the bedside table drawer, but the sheets beneath his pillow were free of weaponry and he could fall asleep in his boxers. It was still Gotham, but it was…less Gotham. It was the Gotham where Commissioner Gordon had a house, the kind of place Catherine used to daydream they’d move to when Willis made bank. 

Catherine’s dreams had faded from their conversations even before the cancer and the drugs that followed. The bedroom and living room suites she loved had not, only because the pages she’d torn out of a Sears catalog stayed on the fridge until after Jason fled the tomb of an apartment. He’d prep meds from the chilled interior or grab ice from the freezer and stare at the life that had slipped away from them, while life slipped away from her. 

When he’d gotten to the point where he was picking paint colors, he found a magazine at the hardware store and followed the first display home he liked as if it were an instruction manual. He didn’t have strong preferences for specific colors, he just wanted it to look like a real home. Except, that is, for the bedroom— if it clashed with the rest of the house, he didn’t care, because he’d wake up surrounded by her favorite colors and feel like she wasn’t so far away. He was getting closer and closer to the date that marked the point where more than half his life had been lived without her, and every small way to keep her near him mattered.

Maybe that safety was why he felt like he could put the only picture he had framed of him _with_ Bruce up next to hers. 

Some of the family knew about the house. Barbara had been sworn to silence, after chewing him out on the phone for not telling her that her father was in some kind of danger. He appreciated that she’d at least assumed if he was setting up shop that close to Gordon, it was to protect him, and he’d hung up on her twice and then invited her for dinner just to prove his story.

He felt bad for not making the place more accessible, but she’d climbed the front steps in her chair like it was nothing and then they’d spent most of the evening looking at his library after eating dinner on the little back deck. Not much seemed to stop her, and he figured that it was one of the reasons she’d lasted so long in their world. She’d left the house with a promise to not tell anyone.

Alfred ended up finding out because of the mint. Jason admitted defeat to himself on that front and called for help. Nothing rattled Alfred anymore, not stubborn mint and certainly not stubborn grandsons. The mint went up in smoke and Alfred brought over seedlings and compost to get a new bed started. If he’d ever wanted to tell Bruce, he never mentioned it to Jason and Jason never had to ask him not to tell.

He wasn’t hiding, after all, exactly. He was just…waiting. Until he was ready. It was too much a part of him now to just fling out into the open unprepared, to deal with the comments about how he was too young or had a home already or that the security system could be better. 

To know how he was going to handle the idea of an actual identity, one that wasn’t dead and buried.

Having a home felt like a doorway to that, to having a life that wasn’t just being the Red Hood, and like the tender young plants in his flowerbeds he was biding his time and stretching his roots. He didn’t know yet what he wanted the rest of that life to look like or sound like. He couldn’t answer questions he didn’t know the answers to himself.

Jason stopped planning. He stopped trying to plan. He’d been planning one move after another since Talia had hauled him up from the murky Pit. The house was comfortable and he soaked in the safety of not needing to plan.

Not planning was probably how he’d ended up with pneumonia and Bruce in the house, with no idea how to field anything he might say about it. 

At least it was a place he could sleep.

* * *

Jason slept until he couldn’t, until he was waking up from heavy sleep with a heavy chest and the sensation of dirt on his head and limbs and life. He came awake with a rattling gasp, trying to get oxygen into his sick lungs. He heard Bruce sprinting up the stairs.

Then he was in the room, holding Jason upright while he coughed and coughed. Jason felt boneless and shivery when he slumped back against him, tears in his eyes from the coughing fit. For every moment he second guessed telling Dr. Thompkins to call Bruce, he had three other moments convinced it was the right call. 

Wheezing while Bruce set up the nebulizer one-handed, while holding him up with his other arm, was one of the latter. 

“It’s okay, Jay. It’s okay,” Bruce kept saying, and Jason wanted to tell him to shut up but he couldn’t. It took a second to realize that it wasn’t just the pneumonia making it hard, it was that he was crying. 

He closed his eyes and saw the deep black of a coffin, the dense smoke of an explosion. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t…

“Breathe, son,” Bruce said in his ear. “You can. Breathe.”

Jason forced his eyes open and he stared at the pale pink curtains. Behind them, the windows were navy with night. He paced his inhales and exhales. Bruce held the mask over his face, not bothering with the elastic strap.

“There you go,” Bruce said, his voice a deep rumble against Jason’s spine.

“I fucking…hate…this,” Jason bit off, the syllables rasping.

“It’s okay,” Bruce said. “That’s okay.”

Jason sucked in medicine and oxygen and let his head fall back on Bruce’s shoulder. He felt all of thirteen again, seriously sick for the first time at the Manor. When the medicine cups and pills and IV for fluids sent him down a suffocating mental spiral to hospitals rooms with social workers and scrounging change for taxi rides, Bruce had carried him from bed to the den. He’d held him on his lap, wrapped in blankets, while Cartoon Network played endlessly in the background. Jason had felt like he was too big to be held or watch cartoons, but they’d kept the memories away and he’d basked in the security.

He felt too big for this now, for Bruce’s arm around him, for the quilt being pulled up over him while he trembled. A hand, cool and dry, pressed against his forehead and he leaned into it.

“You’re burning up,” Bruce muttered. 

“Nnnnf,” Jason said, soaking up the way being held wasn’t a constraint, but the thing that kept the flashes of the coffin and smoke and green water away. He was too physically miserable to pretend he didn’t want it, and it felt like days instead of hours since he’d stumbled into Dr. Thompkins’ clinic. That sort of effort— riding a bus, walking blocks, staying upright— seemed impossible now.

This time, he didn’t last until the end of the medicine to fall asleep. He drifted off with a warm body at his back, his joints aching with fever. When the machine was shut off and the mask moved away, Bruce didn’t move for a long time. Jason roused slightly when he did shift to get up, just enough to register the press of a kiss to his temple. 

* * *

The next time he woke, he was drenched in sweat. He was alone, a lamp on in the room. The glowing clock said it was four in the morning. His mouth was sandpaper, dry and rough. 

Breathing was a bit easier, so he got up and ventured downstairs to gulp water from a glass at the kitchen sink. He got as far as turning a burner on under the tea kettle before his surge of energy bottomed out, and he sank into a chair to wait for the kettle to whistle.

A lump on the couch had been snoring softly, but he should have figured the slightest commotion would wake Bruce. He materialized in the kitchen doorway, in slacks and an undershirt, his hair a matted mess he was combing out with his fingers as he stood there. 

“Where’s the tea?” he asked, his voice still rough with sleep. He opened a cabinet on a guess before Jason answered, and pulled honey out from the crowded collection of bottles and cans there.

“One over,” Jason croaked. 

Bruce studied the selection and pulled down a box of ginger lemon. He didn’t say anything else while the water heated, while pulling out mugs and dropping tea bags into their depths.

Jason was grateful for sturdy chairs. He felt like his frame wouldn’t bear his own weight. The fever that had broken was already coming back, and he shivered and resisted the desire to sprawl across the table top.

When the tea was seeping, Bruce left the kitchen and returned with the bamboo cotton blanket from the couch. Jason clutched it around himself when Bruce draped it over his shoulders, and he was still holding the edges in his fists when a steaming mug of tea was set in front of him.

“Was it…like this? When you bought it?” Bruce asked, casually, as if he’d ever asked anything casually in his entire life.

“No,” Jason said, leaning so the steam drifted up into his face. It was moist, unlike smoke, and that made all the difference. “I did most of it.”

“Hmm,” Bruce said to his tea. 

“I was going to invite you over,” Jason said lamely, freeing one hand from the blanket to curl his fingers around the mug. “Eventually.”

“You did a good job with it,” Bruce said, eyes flicking up to meet Jason’s. It was the briefest second and then his gaze was roaming over the cabinets, the floors, the trim. “It suits you.”

“Thanks.” Jason buried the choked reply in a sip of hot tea, letting the burn wash down his throat with the stupid tears. He didn’t need Bruce’s approval, Bruce’s pride.

Until Bruce was giving it, Jason didn’t know how much he’d still wanted it.

Was the fear that he wouldn’t get _this_ the reason he’d really put it off?

Jason shook his head at the thought, but he knew he was lying to himself. He scooted the chair a few inches across the floor so he could lean on the wall while he drank the tea.

“It’s…” Bruce paused and cleared his throat, but his voice was still little more than a whisper when he began again. “It’s the harbor for me. Whenever I’m ill. I dream about the harbor, and the bay. I swear I can taste it, the less I can breathe the stronger the taste is. You know that rotten seawater? Like dead fish and burnt oil.”

Jason nods.

“I dream I’m drowning in it. Once, when…when I was just starting. That first year. I dove off a ship in the suit and got caught in trailing fishing net. The boots were heavy, the cape was heavy. I blacked out and came to, still under water. I thought I was going to die. I should have died.”

“What…” Jason licked his lips. “What happened?”

“Cobblepot tried to start a motorboat and the blades tore the netting before the engine stalled. The force threw me toward the surface instead of further down. I made it to a pier.”

It made Jason’s aching chest ache even more, to think of a time Bruce hadn’t had a Robin around. He hadn’t even known he’d needed one yet, and he already did. In that moment, he resented Tim Drake just a tiny bit less, if it meant that Bruce had had a Robin then.

Jason knew how hard it was to go alone.

“When I get sick, that’s what I see. Waking up underwater and not knowing which way to go.”

When Jason couldn’t breathe, he saw too many things. He’d trashed the room at Dr. Thompkins’ clinic because it was everything at once. Just thinking about it made his heart thud, his breath catch.

“You don’t have to tell me,” Bruce said, and the panic was soothed away. “I just want you to know that I understand. It’s more than just…being ill.”

“It’s a lot of things,” Jason said, a willing concession. He swirled the tea in the mug and stared at it. Maybe someday he could talk about them, but not right now. Right now, he just wanted to doze and not even think about coffins or bombs or pits. 

He wanted to stretch out and be safe, held out of reach of those ugly thoughts.

“Do you think I could try to sleep on the couch?” Jason asked, leaving unsaid the _‘not alone’_.

“Of course, Jay,” Bruce said. “It’s your house.”

Jason sipped tea past the lump in his throat and he nodded, quickly. “Yeah. Yeah.”

When the mugs were put in the kitchen sink, Jason dragged himself to the couch and collapsed sideways there. Bruce put medicine in his palm, and a glass of water, and Jason sucked them both down. He blinked at the TV and handed the remote to Bruce.

“You find somethin’,” he mumbled, letting his heavy lids close. “Don’t care what.”

The TV clicked on, and channels flipped by until the screen settled on something animated. Maybe Bruce knew something he didn’t about the sort of things it would be easy to tune out as soothing white noise, because it worked. 

Or maybe it was Bruce himself, sitting near where he was curled up on the couch, a hand carding through Jason’s tangled hair. The buttery smooth leather was cool against his face, the smell of the cleaner and conditioner he used on the couch strong with each breath he drew in through his nose.

His couch. His TV, his living room, his house. 

Jason was sore all over and coughing hurt enough to draw a whine from his throat, but having Bruce there clicked into place like one jointed floorboard into another, less like an intrusion into Jason’s life and more like the next part of building a home.


End file.
